"Press F to Intervene": a brief history of the Use Key Genre

There are NO *detailed* spoilers for BioShock Infinite in this post, so relax. I try to speak in a really general / vague way about what happens in the last third of the game.

Can a game about picking the right hat to decrease your machine gun recoil by 45.2% -- can that game reasonably do the work of talking about what it's actually about, much less talk about what it thinks it's about?

No, of course not.

But if there's one image from BioShock Infinite that I'm going to remember, it's this:

Design reboot: Thief.

This post relies on familiarity with the gameplay / affordances in Thief. You may want to read Dark Past or my write-up on "Assassins." You're also encouraged to read through Mr. Monahan's Design Reboot blog.

I've been watching Thief 4 coverage over the past months and I'm increasingly convinced that I'm going to hate it. So let's pretend, just for fun, that I'm making a Thief-like... What are the best qualities of Thief to preserve, and which parts of the sacred cow would I lop-off? Here's what I'm thinking:

KEEP: Level size. Thief levels vary from medium to extremely large. "Life of the Party" was a single mission where you had to traverse an entire cityscape of rooftops through two dozen buildings and then also infiltrate a huge skyscraper at the end. Sheer architectural scale is important to maintain a sense of...

KEEP: Infiltration and exfiltration. You have to get in, rob the place, and get out. There's always an outside and an inside, and it's great to feel that you're not supposed to be inside. But previous Thief games usually neglected exfiltration as redundant backtracking or worse -- something totally nonexistent because you've already incapacitated the entire guard garrison by the end of a mission. (My favorite Thief 1 mission, Assassins, is one of the few missions to really do something with exfiltration.)

ADD: Organic use of dynamic lighting. With dynamic lighting and shadows, you can do totally unimaginative setpieces where you have to hide in a guard's shadow or hide in the shadow of moving objects on a conveyor belt. But something else is going on here: with dynamic lighting, open doors and windows become light sources -- and if you can close the door or block the window, you've "extinguished" that light -- but if there's a ramp in front of that window, you can't put anything there to block it because it'll just slide down, etc. That possibility sounds much less horrible than a contrived puzzle that you designed to death.

Amnesia, Among the Sleep, and horror economics.

I used to have a low opinion of the many busywork-type interactions that fill survival horror games. To me, it seemed like these games were about managing this totally artificial-feeling, designed-to-death resource scarcity ("I need more red herbs! I need more lantern oil! I need 9mm ammo!") and scavenging your environment for supplies. How can you optimize your ammo usage for the future when you don't know where you'll be or what you'll be up against?

Maybe these horror games work sometimes because, really, they're about the experience of being poor. They're about paralyzing uncertainty and the inability to plan, but still surviving. It's about how math can tire you out.

No Show Conference is an intimate game dev / game crit conference at MIT. And they want talk proposals.

Last year, last No Show Conference, I had a pretty good time. I met many MIT games academics, East Coast indies, Canadian indies, and interactive fiction authors. It's kind of a strange crowd but I think it works, and the lack of bullshit really helps everyone talk to each other as people instead of networking opportunities. For this year, No Show's back -- and they've even lowered the price to make it more affordable -- which is pretty much unheard of, among the game conference circuit, and to me it shows that they don't just talk the talk but they actually go and do what they argue for.

Much like last year, they offer a $500 travel / hotel stipend for speakers.

So go and submit a talk! You have until June 7th. It's a conference and community worth supporting.

Design futures: AutoBrushes, levels that build themselves, and the politics of procedurality.

If Bethesda's detailed GDC presentation about modular level design kits for Fallout / Skyrim showed me anything, it's that modularity is actually a huge pain in the ass -- and not the good kind of ass pain either. Why should we keep building 3D levels in this slow, totally unnecessary way, with a workflow that's at least a decade old?

I remember a time when level design was slightly faster, and that time was the time of the brush. What if we could combine the benefits of modularity (variety / adaptability / abstract detail out of design) with the benefits of a brush-based workflow (simplicity / speed / focus on "platonic forms" of design)?

Cubemapped Environment Probes: Source Engine-style cubemap implementation in Unity 4 Pro

I wanted a static baked-in solution for doing cubemap-based reflections in Unity. Using cubemaps instead of (or with) traditional Blinn-Phong specular is great for games if (a) the light sources / environments stay static, and if (b) the player's camera will frequently be close enough to see small surface details. If that sounds like your game, maybe baked cubemaps are the way to go for you.

Thoughts on VR aesthetics

The current working standard for first person games is Valve's VR implementation in Team Fortress 2: the player uses the mouse to move an on-screen reticule, and if the reticule leaves the middle "dead space" screen area then it rotates the player's torso. Head tracking does not change where you're aiming -- and outside of giving you peripheral vision, it is somewhat meaningless within the context of the game.

Is that the best VR implementation we can do? To render it meaningless?

Right now, the Oculus Rift exists mainly in this realm of performance art -- where most of the interesting stuff happens when watching other people use the Rift, and imagining what they see and what their experiences are. The vast majority of videos out there focus on the player instead of the game ("This is the future of gaming. It looks like a dog trying to escape from under a duvet."), and the best Rift games focus on the intersection between virtual and non-virtual, like players who physically kneel on the ground to play the guillotine sim Disunion. I think much of this dynamic is informed by the growing dominance of Let's Play (LP) culture... which is to say that the "best players" are now the ones who can "perform" the game in the most compelling way and reveal new aspects of the game that we didn't realize before, and that way's context usually exists outside of getting high scores / headshots. What it means to be "good at a game" is slowly shifting from sport to sport as theater.

Virtual head animation has never been more human and true. We are all now cinematographers who can directly share our fields of vision in extremely subtle ways; the act of looking is now the most expressive input in video games today. And right now, the "best VR standard" is rendering it meaningless?

Don't forget that the Rift isn't just a display -- it is also a controller. Let's do stuff with it.

Post-partum: teaching Unity.

Here's a bit of reflection on my first semester teaching Unity at an art and design school, mixed undergrad / grad level. They're in the form of rough guidelines that I'm giving myself for next semester:

» Don't assume mastery of coding fundamentals. Some students will be able to formulate and solve abstract problems with little help, while other students will need to be taught the difference in syntax between variables and functions, repeatedly. Course prerequisites, even if enforced by your school's registar (at Parsons, they usually aren't), are no guarantee of mastery. In my class, I put a code comprehension section on the midterm exam, only to realize that some students didn't understand nested for() loops, which implies they don't fully grasp how unnested for() loops work either; but it was the midterm, and it was already too late. Some students didn't know how to use AND or OR, and some didn't understand scoping. I should've caught these problems earlier instead of unintentionally punishing them for it.
Recommendation: On the first or second week, conduct a diagnostic quiz that asks code comprehension questions, and assess which students need which kinds of help.

» Cover vector math, every day. Do light drilling. Even students with significant code experience may have trouble conceptualizing how vectors work together / what vector operations do, especially in 3D. I don't think I'd necessarily impose grade school drilling, like worksheets with 50 problems and 1 minute to solve all of them, but a few minutes or short drill, every day or week will help a lot.
Recommendation: At the start and end of each class, do some vector math problems together as a class. Practice thinking about vectors in multiple modes: visually as spatial coordinates, abstractly as sets of numbers, and procedurally as variables in code.

» Teach Maya and Unity, side by side, in parallel. I front-loaded the syllabus with Unity stuff, and only started Maya in the second half of the course. I think this was a mistake because we ended up having a 2 week break where students did very little code and focused on Maya, and it seemed to be like we were moving "backwards." I should've paced the class better to prevent this dead time.
Recommendation: When teaching the basics of 3D transformations in Unity, also teach the basics of 3D transformations in Maya, and emphasize the many similarities in interface and project organization: scene hierarchies, hotkeys, lights, materials handling, etc.

» Don't teach coroutines. I tried to teach this early in the course, and it ended up confusing a lot of people. Personally, I use coroutines constantly because I find them really useful for timing things... but maybe I shouldn't have projected my own practices on them.
Recommendation: Teach the use of timer variables and bookkeeping variables / using Time.time instead. It is worse practice sometimes, but it is a more immediately intuitive way of timing things, and reinforces fundamentals of controlling logic flow.

» End with procedural mesh generation / mutation? I really want this to be an "a-ha" moment of the course -- when students realize that everything is just a different way of storing data, and artists are just people who can figure out how to get the data looking and performing the way they want. Considering the emphasis on 3D, I think this is a much more coherent endpoint than my previous emphasis on AI and behavior.
Recommendation: If students have been working in Maya for a while and they understand for() loops, they might be ready to iterate through arrays of mesh data. Maybe look at implementing some Perlin noise or a simple sculpting tool.

This summer, I'm going to try to put these ideas into practice when teaching 6 week Unity intensives at NYU Game Center. Feel free to check-up on us on the class GitHubs (session 1) / (session 2).

#screenshotsaturday: May 2013

On focalization, and against convenient understandings of immersion / flow.

This post is significantly changed from a talk I gave at Different Games. It was prompted by Jon Stokes approaching me and helpfully telling me that my talk made no sense, so hopefully this post will be more clear. SPOILER WARNING: I spoil Brendon Chung's excellent Thirty Flights of Loving.

As a self-proclaimed developer of "personal games", one thing that puzzles me about these games and empathy is that no one really knows how emotional transfer between players and games works -- like, what's really happening when you control a character in a game? Do you sympathize directly with the narrative situation, or are you role-playing, or do you think more in strategic terms, or what's going on? These words -- flow, immersion, empathy, role-playing -- how much do they really explain or predict how we, as humans, experience video games?

There's very little actual research on this because, I think, the game industry isn't interested in funding it and finding out. About the only researcher I've heard of is Jonas Linderoth and he argues for severe skepticism, or that games don't actually teach you anything outside of games -- and that isn't something the game industry would want people to hear.

Notes on first person virtual reality / implementation in Unity.

I've been implementing the Oculus Rift VR goggles into my first person projects, and the process has been... interesting.

Valve's excellent introduction to working with virtual reality (per their experiences in porting Team Fortress 2) is the definitive primer to working with VR in a first person context, and more or less the state of the art. However, it also ends with a powerful notion: we're only just beginning with VR, and it's going to take time before we know what we're doing. Here's a very brief summary of general design guidelines, as defined by Valve:

Game development as drawing; gesture, iteration, and practice.

(NOTE: There are sketches of nude human figures in this post, with their anatomy intact.)

If you ask any great AAA game artist about the single-most important thing you can do to get better at art, they'll probably start mumbling about "foundation." Photoshop, Maya -- these are just newfangled versions of pencils or paintbrushes or clay. They won't really teach you how to paint, or how to sculpt, or how to look at things and represent them. In this way, a bit of traditional, non-digital fine arts education can be an extremely useful tool sometimes.

In the pretty casual 12 week, 2 hours a week drawing class I took, the teacher presented two ways of thinking about drawing:

Let's Play: the first section of Anomalous Materials from Half-Life 1

So I recorded a Let's Play for Jake Elliott's "Let's Play" event in Chicago a few days ago. Since the event's now over, I thought I'd share the video for the entire internet to see. In it, I talk a bit through the design of the first section of Anomalous Materials, and how it played with the affordances of first person views / represents two divergent ideas of "realism" / presence, and what being in a virtual world entails. WARNING: a good portion of the video is me staring at a wall and talking over it, sorry...

"From Earth" mod needs writers / narrative designers / concept artists / voice actors.

"From Earth" is probably going to be one of the very last Half-Life 2 mods ever made. It's Mirror's Edge-ish first person parkour + a mechanical machine-shop crafting-puzzle system + original science fiction setting. If I had time, I'd totally help them out... I don't have the time, unfortunately, but I really want to make time...

However, I really do think this is a golden opportunity for people with some mod skills but want to collaborate on a bigger project and focus on specific design problems. This is a veteran mod team that has already finished and released 2 very big mods already; they're small, focused, and they know what they're doing. (Most mod teams have difficulty getting coders, character modelers, and animators -- but that's exactly what they already have, so they're in a really really good position.)

This project is looking for writers / narrative designers, level designers, concept artists, and voice actors. (Again, these are traditionally the easiest roles to recruit for mod projects, the so-called "idea people" who are considered plentiful and worthless. The fact that this team is focusing on recruiting for these roles, consciously and thoughtfully, demonstrates they're different from the vast graveyard of dead projects -- these people get things done.)

Imagine you're a writer / narrative designer who wants to get into AAA, but you're incapable of making games yourself. Ideally, you would learn how to make games yourself, go indie, and bypass AAA entirely -- but if, for some reason you still want to go into the mouth of the beast, this is fantastic chance for you to actually do what they would do... You'll make demands for animations and audio logs and scripted sequences; the team will helpfully explain to you why that would take several years of work; you'll work around these limits and genuinely improve your own ability to design narrative; it'll be hard, but rewarding.

This is a solid project. They're doing a lot of things right. They have most of the core game already working and implemented. If you're a decent writer or multiplayer Source Engine mapper or environmental artist or someone, looking to hone your skills or practice single player design, you should definitely jump on-board. You will make good work and get results.

(Disclaimer: I've playtested From Earth.)

"Different Games" at NYU-Poly, April 26-27 2013.

This weekend I'm giving a talk called "First Personal" at the "Different Games" conference, this Friday and Saturday at NYU-Poly in Brooklyn. I'm going to talk about first person games and why I think they're really well-suited for making personal games. I'll also be showing the newest iteration of CondomCorps in the arcade they've setup.

The conference is free to attend, so if you're in the area you should come hang out for at least a little while.

"Let's Play" at the Nightingale Cinema, April 25 2013 in Chicago.

Jake Elliott and co. are running a "Let's Play" themed event at 8:00 PM on Thursday at Chicago's "beloved microcinema", the Nightingale. What is the LP and what's interesting about the form? What's the difference between LP and machinima, and what happens when that line blurs? (Extra credit: play the Stephen Lavelle classic Rara Racer for further commentary of the LP genre.)

Daphny and Liz Ryerson (and me!), among other artists, have made new original videos just for the show. I think some are even doing live Let's Plays as performance (!!!) Personally, I had never recorded an LP before and it felt really weird to me... are the results compelling at all? Find out in Chicago, tomorrow! Full description and info pasted after the jump:

Urban scenes

Wrapping up work on CondomCorps this week.

The color palette is heavily inspired by the "Benten" levels of Jet Set Radio, as those levels always felt the most "urban" to me. But if we're talking about urbanness, then "what is a city without its people?" The pedestrians on the sidewalks are particles, but obviously particles -- so I think they're actually less conspicuous than, say, the animated runner sprites in Mass Effect 3 skyboxes. To me, that's what most video games get wrong about cities: they are utterly crowded things.

And if anyone asks: yes, New York City has 2 Chrysler buildings...

Dreamlab: VR research at Parsons.

Next year, me and Kyle are starting a (very small) virtual reality ("VR") research lab at Parsons. We've set our initial long-term research initiative as some sort of "virtual sculpting studio" -- so maybe one day you'll put on your Oculus Rift and power gloves, sculpt some virtual clay, and then send the model to a 3D printer? Wouldn't that be cool? We have lots of other ideas too, but those will require a lot more money / space / time, so this is us, thinking "small."

If you think it sounds awesome, please "like us" (ugh) on this weird startup grant social media platform thing so some giant well-funded entity can give us money. Or, if you happen to be a corporate or nonprofit entity that has money you'd like to part with, please get in touch.

The full proposal text is here:

We envision virtual reality as a “place” that allows us to do useful work and experience unique phenomena. Much like going to a woodshop to work wood, or a kitchen to work food, we imagine dedicated VR spaces for people to work and play with data in intuitive ways. How can we use the unique affordances of virtual realities to visualize, embody, and interface with virtual data most effectively?

A letter to a letter

Dear Raph Koster's Letter to Leigh,

You were right when you said that the authors of "personal games" would probably take you the wrong way... It's hard not to. It's impossible to divorce the politics from the forms of these games, which, yes, makes them difficult to critique as formal designed objects without appearing to attack their politics.

These authors argue that "apolitical formalism" is inherently political, that the worst politics pretends it's not politics. Porpentine tweeted that she prefers "blatant bullshit over honeyed poison." (Uh, she was talking about you, by the way!)

I'm sure you'll understand these authors' reluctance to trust this kind of criticism after the past decade of sustained critical attack on such games and their contexts -- perhaps these "crimes" weren't always inflicted by you or whatever, but it's certainly a trigger when you begin your letter with wondering, "what is a game?" My brain shifts into red alert. That line of inquiry has been a long favored tool of well-intentioned oppression, because these arguments often masquerade as thoughtful discourse but function as a weapon of de-legitimization, that argue these personal games can't really fit a formal definition of game. The emotional leap is that these people can't really fit a formal definition of people. Adding, "it's okay if it's not a game" comes off as sounding like, "it's okay if you're not a person," which doesn't really help you seem apolitical.

Again, you're aware of this. You are a very carefully written letter.

The joys of sub-projecting in Unity

Let's say you have a personal Unity framework full of useful models, prefabs, shaders, scripts, etc. that you'd like to use across several projects. How do you best deploy that framework?

If you use version control, then maybe in each Unity project folder you'd also have a special folder hooked up to an SVN or a Git submodule. (Though I find Git submodules to be scary and unwieldy and more trouble than they're worth.) If you don't use version control, maybe you'll keep a separate Unity project just for your framework and from that you'll export a new Unity package every now and then, then separately import and update the Unity packages across your different projects as needed.

There's a third way that I'm trying, inspired slightly by how the Source Engine's filesystem works: basically, you keep all your projects *inside* a main Unity project, so they exist more as "mods" or "sub-projects", and they interface with each other as well as a main framework folder that has core prefabs and scripts.

Post-partum: #lostlevels 2013

As 1/4 of the organizing force behind Lost Levels (the other 3/4 being: Harry Lee, Fernando Ramallo, and Ian Snyder), I'd like to talk briefly about it.

It went really well. Like really really well, much weller than I ever thought it could've went. At least 150-200 people showed up, and we had about 50-70 speakers in the end. Thanks everyone.

I'm sure all attendees and speakers have different takeaways from Lost Levels: on the power of organization, the ultimate uselessness of Powerpoint, why GDC must be destroyed, why GDC must exist, etc. At the very least, I'd like to think we succeeded, to some degree, to break down a sense of "exclusiveness" and unreachability among all game developers and players.

As a former modder, I occupy a strange space in the game developer ecosystem: my background is in AAA tools and techniques, but my politics and interests will often clash with AAA politics and interests. I can't identify completely with the more militant indies nor more militant AAAs. However, I do think militancy has a crucial purpose, and that purpose is to move the middle to a better place, and right now I think that place is toward those who have the gall to align themselves with the forces of human empathy.

Now, all throughout Lost Levels, I felt very conscious of this appearance that we're "against" GDC. Again, we are not against GDC; rather, we are against a pervasive system and mindset that prevents GDC from changing for the better. A giant corporate conference structure has strengths, but it also has very real gaping flaws -- its expense forms a prohibitive cost barrier that fundamentally limits the diversity of voices who supposedly represent all game developers, which enforces a monoculture of ideas and works. Monocultures kill games.

My main takeaway from Lost Levels: we all possess some degree of power. We must simply exercise it collectively, decisively, and tenderly.

Thanks for participating and see you next year!

(As a reminder: I am only 1 of 4 Lost Levels organizers and my opinions do not necessarily represent the rest of the organizers' opinions; it's okay if you disagree with me, you will still always be welcome at all Lost Levels existing and imaginary, whether I'm helping to organize it or not.)

"You sleep rather soundly for a murderer": on murder systems and destabilizing virtual societies.

In many video games, you must kill stuff all the time, and quite frequently. Killing becomes the environment. It is so pervasive that killing becomes the context for something else -- clicking on a soldier's face rapidly enough to demonstrate mouse dexterity, or chaining together different button presses to make combos, or optimizing your stats to make a big number even bigger, or carefully managing various bars before they deplete. The killing is rarely about the killing. (Which makes you wonder why we need to wrap it in the narrative of killing.)

During an Elder Scrolls game, you will likely kill thousands of things. However, all of those killings are sanctioned by the NPCs in the game: you are killing monsters outside of cities and villages. Their deaths don't matter -- more will respawn to take their place, or maybe the game will delete them to free-up memory when you wander away far enough. They exist only to be killed. They are domesticated and farmed.

The Dark Brotherhood questlines in Elder Scrolls games, then, are one of the few instances in games that really focus on killing as killing. Specifically, it frames murder as a deeply anti-societal, anti-social, transgressive act, and explores the philosophy required to justify it. At it's best, it's also deeply systemic.